Abstract:
In this paper, we present the implementation of
a remote monitoring and interaction system for medical
applications. Recent advances in medical platforms have
focused mainly on continuous and constant remote monitoring
of a patient. Compared to existing solutions, our system has
placed emphasis on remote interaction between a patient and a
physician. We provide in this system capabilities to perform
diagnosis and treatment over-the-air. Such system is valuable
for instant response to emergency health alerts. Today, this
emergency process of monitoring and feedback actuation is
done by a self-contained device (such as an implantable
cardioverter-defibrillator), which provides treatment
automatically when detecting abnormalities. We believe that it
is very important to involve the physician in this process of
actuated treatment.
We accomplish this goal by virtually connecting a patient
and a physician anytime anywhere. We propose a mixed twoand
three- tier infrastructure that extends current three-tier
architecture with a GSM/GPRS peer-to-peer channel. We
present a working system that is built on top of commercial
cellular phones and wireless sensor nodes. In our system, a
physician can create and subscribe to ”interests” provided by a
body sensor network deployed on a patient. An interest is
defined as the useful information acquired from applying a
series of computations to collected vital signals. Profiles of
interests can be periodically delivered in the form of health
status reports, or they can be used to trigger emergency health
alerts immediately when abnormalities are detected. The
advanced interactive capabilities of our system allow a remote
physician to further query for detailed information, to create
and subscribe to new interests, to set sensor parameters, and to
trigger actuators for over-the-air treatment. Additionally, we
introduce a concept of multi-resolution to help a physician
identify useful information from a huge amount of sensor data
collected by the body sensor network on a patient and hence to
reduce communication costs. This paper describes why our
proposed infrastructure suits novel medical scenarios and
outlines the design and implementation of our system.